Email Confidentiality Disclaimers: Annoying but Are They Legally Binding?
If so many companies use email disclaimers, they must have value, legally or otherwise, right? Why else would so many companies use them? Good question. Keep reading (hint: the answer has to do with our collective mistake letting the lawyers (full disclosure – I am one of them) run our country!!).
Mr. Sinclair’s article underscores the reality that automatically including disclaimers in every email decreases any given email footer’s overall effectiveness. As the Vice President of the Association of Corporate Counsel put it, so long as “you have your order from [Mexican restaurant] Chipotle marked as privileged… no one will take you seriously.”
Overall, email disclaimers are unlikely to have much benefit.
Email disclaimers are of little consequence.
What does The Economist have to say about them? Spare us the e-mail yada-yada
“IF THIS e-mail is received in error, notify the sender immediately.” “This e-mail does not create an attorney-client relationship.” “Any tax advice in this e-mail is not intended to be used for the purpose of avoiding penalties under the Internal Revenue Code.” Many firms—The Economist included—automatically append these sorts of disclaimers to every message sent from their e-mail servers, no matter how brief and trivial the message itself might be.
E-mail disclaimers are one of the minor nuisances of modern office life, along with fire drills, annual appraisals and colleagues who keep sneezing loudly. Just think of all the extra waste paper generated when messages containing such waffle are printed. They are assumed to be a wise precaution. But they are mostly, legally speaking, pointless. Lawyers and experts on internet policy say no court case has ever turned on the presence or absence of such an automatic e-mail footer in America, the most litigious of rich countries.